YouTube Edu Launches

YouTube launched a new section of its site Thursday that organizes the video channels of more than 100 colleges and universities.

UCLA

From “Prom Dress Rugby,” one of UCLA’s most popular videos on YouTube

The section, called YouTube Edu, is the result of about a year’s work on the part of Google employees using their 20% time for outside projects, said Obadiah Greenberg, a partner manager at YouTube. Several of the search giant’s products and services, including Google News and its social-networking site Orkut, had a similar start.

Breaking out the academic channels as a distinct section makes them easier for people to find and exposes scholarly content to a broader audience. “Really what we see as a value in the YouTube partnership is to extend the reach of our content on a platform that millions of people are using every day,” said Ben Hubbard, manager of webcast.berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley’s streaming-video service.

About 200 lecture-based courses in literature, history, law, engineering and other subjects are offered in their entirety through the site, Mr. Greenberg said.

Many colleges have only recently tapped into YouTube to share lectures and other video. “Overall, we as a university need to improve the kind of information about UCLA online,” said Genevieve Haines, a UCLA spokeswoman. The school’s YouTube channel started in September, with “Prom Dress Rugby” and a clip of math prodigy Terence Tao among its most popular.

Stanford, which launched its channel with Oprah Winfrey’s June commencement address, has about 500 videos on YouTube, a mix of academic and event-related offerings. “Particularly in this time when the coverage of higher ed in general is diminishing in the mainstream media, it allows us to tell stories directly in a very effective way to a large audience,” said Scott Stocker, the school’s director of Web communications.

It’s been a busy week for highbrow video. Another site, Academic Earth, formally launched on Tuesday, offering lectures from Harvard, Yale, MIT and other schools.

Mr. Greenberg said the timing is a coincidence. “It just shows how exciting this is, and how hungry people are for this kind of information,” he said.